No Apologies: Speaking Your Mind with Singer @beamiller To see...

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No Apologies: Speaking Your Mind with Singer @beamiller

To see more of Bea’s photos, follow @beamiller on Instagram. For more music stories, check out @music on Instagram.

Bea Miller (@beamiller) is choked up.

Onstage at the Troubadour in Los Angeles, she cocks her head to the floor, causing her artfully messy bottle-blond locks to flop over one eye. It’s a familiar look, one Bea’s fans have come to appreciate through her photos –– beautifully sparse images of white, muted grays and blacks. But in those pictures, Bea is often peeking out from the shadows. Here on stage, she’s in the spotlight, looking out into a crowd of screaming fans.

“Demi uses her position to do something like this,” the 16-year-old singer tells the audience, her already husky voice even thicker with emotion. “So many celebrities don’t use their power.”

Bea is decidedly not one of those celebrities. Tonight, she’s one of the special guests at the concert Demi Lovato has organized to benefit mental health and addiction treatment at the non-profit organization Regular Hero. Several of Demi’s famous buddies are here—Joe Jonas is spinning hip-pop, lots of Destiny’s Child and Justin Timberlake; Kelly Rowland and Christina Perri are set to perform; Perez Hilton is in the sold-out crowd.

It’s a good PR opportunity for Bea, yes. But there’s something markedly different about her. She seems less like one of the “big names” than just a particularly badass member of the mostly teenaged audience. Turns out, that’s exactly what she’s going for.

“A lot of girls, young girls especially, don’t speak their mind very often because it’s not the ladylike, proper thing to do, unfortunately,” she explains during an interview before the show. She answers questions definitively, never trailing off or dissolving into ums and uhs. “A lot more frequently men get away with saying whatever they wanna say. So I think it’s interesting for girls my age to see an outspoken young female artist.”

Bea had to grow from a cherub-cheeked little girl to a striking young woman in the public eye. Three years ago, she appeared and made it to the top 10 on season two of The X Factor, where both her talent and her outspokenness nabbed attention. Soon after she got cut, she was scooped up by Syco Music and Hollywood Records, and last spring, put out her first EP, Young Blood. Over the past year, she’s dropped two songs and videos from that project, the title track and “Fire N Gold.” Now, on the verge of releasing her debut album, Not An Apology (July 24), you might expect at least a little hesitancy to creep into her voice.

Nope.

Born in New Jersey, Bea grew up tagging along with her mother to work. Because her mom was a stage manager for CBS, Miller met plenty of artists before she even entered kindergarten. A music lover and one-time DJ, her mom would make mixtapes for the car rides into New York and sprinkle the Beatles and the Rolling Stones tunes in along with kiddie songs like the “ABCs” or “Itsy Bitsy Spider.”

That Bea was strong-minded was apparent early on. “I’ve always been that type of person to step in and speak their mind where everyone’s thinking it but no one’s saying it,” she says. “I’m not gonna respect you just ‘cause you’re an adult and I’m supposed to. I’m gonna respect you if you earn it.”

Meanwhile, she was developing her creative vision. She loved Barbies, but her play was very structured, with detailed storylines and characters. At the beginning of the summer, she’d start a new “series,” and it would continue throughout the whole summer. “I was super weird,” she says, bursting into laughter. Or she just always knew what she wanted. In fact, that was the biggest challenge of being a contestant on The X-Factor.

“X Factor is a show made to entertain people. You’re a character, really,” she says. “So I didn’t get to pick my songs, my hair style, a lot of my clothes. That was hard for me. I have a very specific vision for myself. It gets me in trouble a lot. I’m a big pain in the ass.”

Perhaps that resoluteness is why she seems so balanced for a teenager who’s spent her adolescence in the spotlight. Even so, haven’t there been struggles?

“It’s been kinda a roller coaster, mainly because I was 13 at the time and [now] I’m 16. Every one year is like two years,” she admits. “I, as a person, have changed so much since then. So it’s mostly been personal struggle. I could change my opinion on this sometime down the line, but for now, I still make time to go and do things with my friends and be a normal girl.”

A normal girl who glows, whether she’s tossing off a “Thanks, babe!” to a fan who hollers that she’s beautiful or goofily pointing out that one of her pinkie fingers doesn’t “work.” Onstage, she launches first into her anthemic single “Young Blood” and finishes with “Fire N Gold.” It’s easy to see why she’s so beloved by her peers. In her music, Bea insists they’re special, one-of-a-kind. Obviously, she makes them believe it.

“Baby, we were born with fire and gold in our eyes,” she belts. Indeed.

–– Rebecca Haithcoat for Instagram @music

by via Instagram Blog